Master SRS Interval Customization

[yorksama]

Right now, when you “Master” an item it says it won’t reappear in your reviews. I think it would be cool to have an option to choose if you want “Mastered” items to keep appearing in your reviews. Let me know if there is already a way to do this.

I know you always have the ability to Cram any items that you want to. I guess this feature would be a way to set up automatic Crams at certain intervals.

For example, the default option for Mastered items could be to have them no longer appear in your reviews. But if I decided that I wanted to brush up on Mastered items every X number of months (ex. 6 months, 8 months, 12 months, etc.), it would be cool to have that option.

Maybe this isn’t a good idea or even feasible. My thought was it’s always good to brush up on things periodically.

[IcyIceBear]

I was thinking about this the other day actually! I think it’d be really neat. And yeah I suppose that’s what cram mastered items are for, but I would like to have them auto show up like once a year or something with the possibility of dropping srs if I fail.

But at the same time I know srs shouldn’t be a forever thing so ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯ personally I settled with that fact and plan to manually go through mastered items on new years or something. But I do think it’d be a neat option to have available for people

[rdennison7]

Hmm, if you “mastered” something, then why would you need to practice it?

[Gacee]

Because memory naturally degrades haha, in an ideal world if something makes it to mastered in the SRS it would need no further review but everybody’s situations are different and people may not encounter certain grammar points for extended periods of time - or they may encounter it and can use it more or less effectively but have forgotten the explicit rules over time.

I personally think it would be a nice addition, although perhaps not necessary for a large portion of the user base.

[josh]

I think the whole idea is that eventually you don’t need to review it any more or rather, to get one out of the SRS cycle. At the point of mastery, there’d be a large enough interval to the point that you’re more likely to come across it in the ‘wild’ before it would show up for review in Bunpro again. Maybe this is more of a personal opinion, but if you’re setting up something to be reviewed a year later, that grammar is more than likely going to show up somewhere in your immersion at some point in between which replaces the need for reviewing it inside of SRS. In fact, I think this somewhat encourages someone to try and come across those mastered points in the wild rather than having them relying on SRS to continue to retain it.

I don’t disagree with having an option for mastered cards continuing to be reviewable in the SRS cycle - but I also highly recommend relying more on immersion for building retention of things.

I think my opinion still stands considering Bunpro is slightly different in that it involves output instead - instead of going to immersion to retain, the idea is that you transfer what you’ve learned in SRS to actual output with native speakers.

[JamesBunpro]

Perhaps simply a pop-up that warns the user that a review will be the last time they’ll see that grammar point, then people can intentionally fail it to keep it in circulation. Currently you can also just change the SRS level of a grammar point manually from its own page.

I think adding something for those who want it gives flexibility without costing anything for other users so it is only a positive. I am personally also of the school of thought that something should be trivial and seen/used frequently enough that SRS isn’t necessary by the time something is mastered but that isn’t a reason to not add this feature if there is significant demand for it.

[Rukifellth]

I think the idea is if you master it, it should be in your memory for a while. Something I heard is if you do not use a word in the span of a year, then the word probably is not worth remembering long-term. If you want to review a word that is so rarely used, that you would want to study it once a year, it seems like kind of a waste. And if you are using it and remembering it every time it appears during that year, then why would you need to review it?

[Saraph]

I’m going to necro this, because no matter what anyone’s opinion about a “mastered” grammar point is, I’m strongly of the opinion that this should at least be customizable and let the user decide how they want to approach this.

As of now, we have close to a thousand different grammar points. Bunpro’s SRS, at least in default settings, is based on output. Understanding a message from someone else is one thing, but remembering all the different grammar patterns when you want to say something yourself, that’s another. I’m not entirely confident that, say 3 years from now, I’ll remember every single pattern I learned here.

The common response here is “if you mastered something, why would you want to review it?” Well, what does it actually mean to master something? It’s just called so because Bunpro called it so. It only means it was successfully used after 6 months. It does not necessarily mean it will stay with us forever. That last interval of 6 months is set in stone here - I can’t for example configure the last interval to be 12 months instead.

Then there’s this point of “if you didn’t ever encounter it anywhere, then you don’t need it anyway”. Well, to me that’s just a slight misunderstanding of what SRS is for. It’s there to periodically remind us that something exists, so that when we eventually do encounter it, we won’t have forgotten it by then.

Lastly, there already seem to be plans for FSRS for the future. FSRS, at least in Anki, doesn’t have strict upper limit for review intervals and I truly believe that’s how it should be.

In summary, put aside the discussion about “mastering” something and just let me configure this. If it works like it does now by default, it won’t affect those who like it this way at all.

[Jake]

It is slated to be included with the current batch of settings

[Saraph]

This is excellent news. Thank you Jake!

[Flandre5carlet]

Fantastic.